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My Past - Their Future: Stories from Cape Barren Island
by Molly Mallett

With a Foreword by Sally Morgan


Mary Frances Mallett - Auntie Molly to her people - was born on Cape Barren Island, in Furneaux Group in eastern Bass Strait, in the mid-1920s. Her people were the Islanders - the Aboriginal community which developed in the Strait in the early years of the nineteenth century. In this, her story, she tells of her childhood - growing up in a close-knit community of families which still lived by the seasonal patterns and cultural traditions of their elders - and of her subsequent adult life on mainland Tasmania, where she played an important role in the Aboriginal community, particularly in the fields of childcare and education. But this is also the story of her people. In 1939 they were the subject of an insensitive scientific study which - however well-intentioned it may have been - treated them in a demeaning manner. Auntie Molly tells us about the human beings behind the scientists' mugshot photographs of her closest relatives. Molly Mallett's story is not only a story of survival but also a celebration of who the Aboriginal Tasmanians are and where they have come from. It is a story of their dignity, a telling of their place.

230x190mm. xvi, 88pp, illustrated in colour and b&w. Soft covers. ISBN 0908528302......$25.00 (AUD)

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